Plenty of leaders have been smart enough to pull a senior AI strategist into their office. But while those people bring foundational experience, strategy is only half of the system.
The other half is the ground-truth fluency that comes from running these tools through real workflows every day, learning where they fail, where they surprise you, and where the integration breaks.
That fluency is concentrated in the most junior cohort.
And the productivity case for combining the two halves is clear: a 2025 Protiviti and London School of Economics study of nearly 3,000 workers found multigenerational AI project teams report 77% productivity, compared with 66% in teams with low generational diversity.
This is why so many AI strategies stay stuck in pilot. Without people actually integrating these tools into their work, the strategy gets written in a vacuum.
The companies getting it right
Some businesses are still running yesterday’s playbook. Klarna laid off 700 customer service workers, replaced them with AI, then publicly reversed course after CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted the strategy delivered lower quality.
On the other hand, IBM is tripling U.S. entry-level hiring in 2026 because of AI. “The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,” CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux said in February. The company rewrote its roles first. Software engineers now spend less time on routine coding and more on interacting with customers. HR staff spend more time intervening with chatbots than answering every question themselves.
McKinsey is increasing North American hiring 12% in 2026, with plans for 15% to 20% growth in non-partner staff over the next five years. North America chair Eric Kutcher told reporters AI is reshaping what consultants do, not whether the firm needs them. The highest-value work still requires human analytical thinking paired with fluency in how to use the technology.
Small businesses are projected to hire nearly 1 million graduates in 2026. As Gusto economist Aaron Terrazas said: “Large companies are playing defense. Small businesses are playing offense.”
Jack Welch pioneered the idea of reverse mentorship at GE in 1999 to teach his executives the internet. Today’s pattern is the same one Welch saw twenty-five years ago: fluency in a generational shift flows up, if you let it.
So let it. Curiosity is a hiring strategy. Credentials are a comfort blanket. The companies that figure this out won’t be the ones who master AI fastest. They’ll be the ones who hired the people who already have, and gave them a seat at the table.
